The Wall Street Journal - 14.03.2020 - 15.03.2020

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 14 - 15, 2020 |A

R

esearchers are racing to de-

velop vaccines and antiviral

therapies to treat the

Covid-19 pandemic. One promising

option is immunotherapy, which

uses components of our immune

system to alter or boost its re-

sponse. Immunotherapy has been

used successfully to treat other vi-

ral diseases as well as cancer and

diseases of the immune system.

An important immunotherapeutic

approach uses natural killer cells.

These cells are part of the innate

immune system, which responds

immediately to new pathogens. (The

adaptive immune system, by con-

trast, develops specific responses

over time). NK cells home in on and

New York

S

omething terrible hap-
pened to classical music
during the 20th century,
and especially after 1945.
You may be called a reac-
tionary or a nostalgist if you ac-
knowledge this fact aloud, but ev-
ery concertgoer knows it. Many
individual composers continued
writing works of enduring value,
but the great preponderance of
classical music written over the
past 75 years is deliberately
opaque and aggressively ugly.
The causes are many and com-
plex: the abiding influence of
atonal music from earlier in the
century, the obsession with origi-
nality and shock value, the gradual
transformation of classical music
into a faux-scientific academic dis-
cipline. But the overall incoher-
ence is undeniable. Every fan of
classical music knows the feeling
of seeing a contemporary com-
poser on the program and in-
wardly despairing.

Some recent composers have re-
sisted the tendency to equate seri-
ous with dissonant or difficult—
Arvo Pärt in Estonia, the late
Dominick Argento in America. But
none have done so in quite the
guileless manner of English com-
poser Alma Deutscher. She writes
music that people want to hear:
orchestral and chamber works that
ordinary listeners—those who
aren’t invested in the “serious”
music industry—actually like.
Her oeuvre is small, but it in-
cludes chamber and orchestral
works of inventiveness, technical
sophistication, wit and, above all,
melodic richness. She has per-
formed her piano concerto and vi-
olin concerto with orchestras in
Europe and the U.S.; her opera,
“Cinderella,” was performed by
California’s Opera San José in 2018
and released on DVD by Sony Clas-
sical. In November, Sony released
“From My Book of Melodies,” a
collection of solo piano works.
Also, she turned 15 in February.
In December Miss Deutscher
played a concert of her works at
Carnegie Hall. The Orchestra of St.
Luke’s performed her violin and
piano concertos with the composer
as soloist for both. The perfor-
mance was enthusiastically re-
ceived, with the audience applaud-
ing between each movement of the
concertos and standing more than
once. I met her two days later at
the Park Hyatt Hotel in New York.
Those who saw Scott Pelley’s

2017 interview with Miss

Deutscher on “60 Minutes”

will know the Alma Deutscher

story’s rough outlines—she

composed a piano sonata at 6,

a piano concerto at 10, a full-

length opera by 12; she has a

preternatural talent for play-

ing two instruments and a

staggering ability to improvise

melodies. Two years after Mr.

Pelly’s interview, she is dis-

cernibly older but still far

from grown-up in appearance.

She wears pigtails and a

bright red dress.

I avoid the topic of her sta-

tus as a wunderkind and ask

instead about her education. “I

don’t go to school,” she says.

“I’m home-schooled. I read

lots and lots of books about

almost everything—history,

geography, fiction, science,

whatever. As long as they’re

interesting.” Her main aca-

demic challenge just now?

German. She and her family

live in Vienna, so “I must learn

to speak and write it. I’m reading

lots in German.”

She has spoken elsewhere of

melodies coming to her from an

early age, so I ask if they get in

the way of her study. “Very often,”

she says. “Sometimes when I’m

talking to someone or trying to

concentrate on something, a mel-

ody will come. It never comes

when you want it to come.” But,

she points out, “composition is not

like inspiration that just comes out

of the head and onto the page. It’s

work. I have studied many scores.

The greatest teachers are the old

masters. I’ve studied the scores of

Richard Strauss, of Beethoven, of

Mozart and many others.”

That she has studied the old

masters is plainly true. You will

know it if you’re passably familiar

with classical music from the 18th,

19th and early 20th centuries and

listen to Miss Deutscher’s orches-

tral works without knowing who

wrote them. Her music doesn’t

“sound like” any one composer but

bears the marks of many—Men-

delssohn and Mozart, for sure, but

also Bach, Georges Bizet and Rich-

ard Strauss.

That, for the cultural elite of

Europe and North America, is the

problem. Nobody wants to go on

record criticizing a child, but Miss

Deutscher is not embraced by the

music world’s influencers. Their

usually off-the-record complaint

has two parts. First, that is she is

one more child prodigy of the kind

we see come and go all the time—

exploited by the music industry

and a public eager for emotionally

shallow works of imitation art.

This criticism doesn’t accord

with her personality. Miss

Deutscher speaks her mind. Her

father and her agent sit nearby,

but they pay no attention to what

the girl is saying to me.

She is also ambitious—deter-

mined to get her point across in a

way that an exploited prodigy

would not be. She relishes talking

about her work and at several

points puts questions to me

(“Where were you sitting in the

hall? Could you hear the violin

properly?”). She is writing another

opera, she says, this one commis-

sioned by the Salzburg State The-

atre, though she coyly refuses to

reveal the subject. Does she plan

to compose a symphony? “Yes,

that’s one of my next projects,”

she says, glad I asked, and adds

that she’s already written one

movement. “Since I was 6, I

wanted to write a symphony. I’d

read a novel in which Nannerl Mo-

zart”—Wolfgang Amadeus’s sis-

ter—“secretly writes symphonies,

and she wasn’t taken seriously be-

cause she was a girl. So I thought,

I want to write symphonies and I

want people to take me seriously.”

T

he second, more serious crit-

icism of Miss Deutscher is

that as a composer she is a

mere savant—capable of producing

ersatz versions of the canonical

works of Western music but in no

way saying anything new or origi-

nal or interesting.

The first thing to say about this

is that she is 15. Mozart’s and

Mendelssohn’s compositions from

their childhood years don’t com-

pare favorably with their mature

works. But Miss Deutscher’s ur-

bane critics don’t fault her for a

lack of technical sophistication.

They dislike her music for the

same reason audiences love it.

They object to its traditional to-

nality, its straightforward emo-

tional appeal, its refusal to ac-

knowledge the repugnance of

human life.

Miss Deutscher is keenly aware

of this criticism, and at Carnegie

Hall she addressed it straightfor-

wardly. Before the evening’s final

work, she spoke from the stage.

“Now, I’ve always wanted to write

beautiful music,” she told the audi-

ence, “music that comes out of the

heart and speaks directly to the

heart. But some people have told

me that nowadays, melodies and

beautiful harmonies are no longer

acceptable in serious classical mu-

sic, because, in the 21st century,

music must reflect the ugliness of

the modern world.” You could hear

people in the audience laughing

with her. The rubes! “Well,” she

went on, “in this waltz, instead of

trying to make my music artifi-

cially ugly in order to reflect the

modern world, I went in exactly

the opposite direction.”

In the piece, “Siren Sounds

Waltz,” the music moves from the

dissonant sounds of Vienna’s city

center, with its noise and ambu-

lance sirens, to a buoyant big-

hearted waltz in which the “si-

rens” are made to sound like

Homer’s rather than Vienna’s.

Because of her youth, her de-

spisers can’t openly spurn her mu-

sic. That will soon change. She’s

an ill fit for the present age. Her

pronunciation and gait suggest

polish and privilege. She embraces

the best of the past and speaks of

beauty without irony or resent-

ment. Just by being who she is,

she’s bound to provoke a fight.

Is she aware that she’s taking

sides in a long-running argument

about the nature and role of mu-

sic? She answers indirectly: “I

think it’s quite simple. I just want

to write music I myself enjoy. I

wouldn’t want to write music I

don’t enjoy right at the moment. If

I had to write music I didn’t

like, I would prefer to be in a

different profession—to be a

travel agent or something. I

don’t see what there is to jus-

tify writing music I don’t like.”

Miss Deutscher is careful not

to dismiss atonal or “ugly” mu-

sic. The Metropolitan Opera, a

few blocks away, has just fin-

ished its run of Alban Berg’s lu-

rid opera “Wozzeck” (1922),

about a poor soldier who kills

his common-law wife. I ask

about this and other dissonant

masterworks, but she doesn’t

take the bait. “I’m very happy

for other people to write what-

ever music they like or find

beautiful,” she says. “And if

some people want to go to

those concerts, fine, wonderful.

But for myself, I’m not yet re-

ally interested in this type of

music. The important thing for

me is that I write what I like.

And who knows? This might

change in 10 years. But I’m not

worried about that.”

Even Arnold Schoenberg

(1874-1951), who famously in-

vented a dissonant musical lan-

guage called serialism, remarked

that there is still much good music

to be written in C major. Miss

Deutscher agrees: “I have more to

say, a lot more to say, in this musi-

cal language,” she says, sitting

erect and speaking volubly. “If I

were to write a novel, I would

write it in English,” she says. “I

wouldn’t try to write a completely

new language. I would try to think

of a new story to tell, and I would

tell it as best I could, but I would

tell it in English. I wouldn’t write

it in some imaginary language I in-

vented.”

In October, Miss Deutscher re-

ceived the European Culture Prize.

In her acceptance remarks, she

suggested that perhaps “a more

tolerant age is dawning, when mel-

ody and beauty will once again be

permitted.” One may surely hope.

She said she wants to be taken se-

riously. Does she worry that music

critics won’t? “I don’t even read

the reviews about myself,” she

says with a laugh. “I don’t read

the internet.”

S

he does have a website, com-

plete with quotes from lauda-

tory reviews. But she says

she plays for the audience, not the

critics: “The people, did you see

them? The people loved it. The au-

dience stood many times. They

were elated, uplifted. What mat-

ters is what the audience thinks.

What the critics write—and I don’t

read it anyway—it doesn’t bother

me....Iseethereaction of the

people. They say what they mean,

they clap when they want to clap.”

Mr. Swaim is an editorial page

writer at the Journal.

A Girl Makes Music Without Irony or Ugliness

KEN FALLIN

This youthful composer

likes to speak ‘directly to

the heart.’ Critics won’t

like it, but audiences do.

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Alma Deutscher| By Barton Swaim

OPINION

Hey, Teacher, Teach Those Kids at Home

School districts
across the nation are
starting to close as
the Covid-19 pan-
demic spreads along
with the fear that we
are doing too little,
too late to contain it.
No one knows how
long affected dis-
tricts will be in re-
cess, but it is likely
to be measured in weeks and months
rather than days. Regardless of
whether students are in class or at
home, schools must dramatically ex-
pand their capacity to provide re-
mote learning.
When student learning is inter-
rupted by school closures, it can have
catastrophic consequences on educa-
tional development. I’ve seen the
damage done to communities where
schools had to close for long periods
following natural disasters. Many
children, especially those from
poorer neighborhoods, never get fully
back on track.
Fortunately, we live in a different
world than we did in 2005, when
Hurricane Katrina decimated New Or-
leans and closed all but a handful of
schools for almost a year. We now
have the technology necessary to
teach students effectively and effi-
ciently using the internet. These tools
can ensure that learning continues
uninterrupted during a crisis, while
providing schools with collateral edu-
cational and financial benefits.
Many schools and districts already
use laptops, tablet computers, smart
boards and other devices to support
classroom instruction. Not every dis-
trict in the country has the ability to
convene students in virtual class-
rooms, but every school system has
at least thought about ways to in-
struct students remotely in the event
of a disruption. For those that ha-
ven’t yet developed strategic plans to

build an instructional system with re-

mote-learning capacity, the current

crisis should drive home the need to

do so.

A ready and waiting remote-learn-

ing system is a game changer during

a major emergency, not to mention

more common disturbances such as

weather-related disruptions, local-

ized health hazards and students

forced into long-term absences for

various reasons. Even when school is

in regular, nonemergency session, re-

mote-learning infrastructure en-

hances classroom instruction and in-

dividualizes students’ learning

experiences. Students who can’t at-

tend school in a traditional setting

because of disabilities or health is-

sues can “dial in” and participate

fully in class through the remote-

learning system.

Remote learning offers educational

opportunities for adolescents whose

behavior problems bar them from the

general-education population. It can

also provide families better support

by providing regular access to instruc-

tors. In some places, it could even

ease overcrowded classrooms.

Ensuring that all schools have the

capacity to provide high-quality re-

mote instruction need not be finan-

cially prohibitive. Even financially

strapped school systems have op-

tions. Schools can secure needed cur-

riculum and instructional materials

through subscriptions and by using

online materials. By leasing the tech-

nology, a district can create and

maintain a comprehensive, techno-

logically supported instructional sys-

tem at a fraction of what it would

cost to buy laptops and tablets out-

right. A byproduct of such arrange-

ments is that vendors will often do-

nate used laptops and tablets to the

district when the time comes to re-

place them with newer models, usu-

ally about every three years. With

proper maintenance, schools can ex-

pand their technology assets at little

to no additional cost.

Other benefits to remote learning

include reducing the cost of transpor-

tation and minimizing wear and tear

on facilities. By helping maintain and

improve student enrollment and av-

erage daily attendance, remote learn-

ing will help preserve and even in-

crease state and federal education

funding, which is often determined

by these measures.

Although it’s possible now to teach

students remotely, and it may even

be desirable in moments like this one,

it’s far from optimal. There’s still no

substitute for in-person, high-quality

teachers. I also don’t mean to mini-

mize the socialization that schools

provide. Learning alongside other

students is critical to ensuring that

young people eventually mature into

healthy, engaged and socially adept

adults.

We all pray that the coronavirus

will prove to be a manageable crisis.

But it should serve as a wake-up call

that the institutions we take for

granted, including public schools,

need to be prepared for new uncer-

tainties. Remote learning is far better

than no learning, which I witnessed

in New Orleans for too long after

Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Vallas formerly ran the public

school systems in Chicago, Philadel-

phia and the Louisiana Recovery

School District.

With schools closing for

weeks or months, it’s time

for districts to get serious

about remote learning.

CROSS
COUNTRY
By Paul G.
Vallas

Include ‘Natural Killer’ Cells in the Covid-19 Arsenal

kill cancerous or virally infected

cells by recognizing molecules

those cells express called stress an-

tigens. For patients incapable of an

adequate innate immune response,

adoptive transfer therapy by infus-

ing NK cells is a direct way to bol-

ster the immune system’s function.

My company, Celularity, has pio-

neered the use of cells derived from

the human placenta left over after

childbirth. Celularity has a proven

system of producing high-quality

cellular medicines under the Food

and Drug Administration’s Good

Manufacturing Practices. The pla-

cental NK cell shows promise as a

safe, efficacious treatment for vari-

ous cancers.

Designated CYNK-001, Celular-

ity’s experimental NK cell is under

clinical investigation with an open

Investigational New Drug applica-

tion on file with the FDA in blood

cancers. It will soon be tested in

solid tumors. It is easily adminis-

tered by intravenous infusion and

has been shown to be safe and well

tolerated in patients.

Scientists demonstrated two de-

cades ago that a deficiency of NK

cells in patients infected with the

SARS coronavirus was associated

with more-severe disease and the

presence of SARS-specific antibod-

ies. NK cell therapy is a deployable,

rapidly scalable approach to treat-

ing Covid-19. And it’s well estab-

lished that immunotherapy can en-

hance vaccine-induced immunity.

Celularity has submitted an In-

vestigational New Drug application

for NK-cell treatment of Covid-19.

Once it’s approved, we could scale

up manufacturing within 45 days.

The FDA has created an expedited

review process for such new thera-

pies. Swift action to streamline reg-

ulations is providing a window of

opportunity for the U.S. again to

lead the world in biomedical inno-

vation, which will save many lives.

Dr. Hariri is founder and CEO of

Celularity.

By Robert J. Hariri

They’re part of the innate

immune system, which

quickly attacks pathogens.